Paying attention to the daily news used to bring people a sizable dose of anger, sometimes mixed with a modest dose of delight. Today it mostly brings exhaustion. For our own mental health, many of us no longer watch TV news and no longer read newspapers or news sites in any depth. In real time, headlines are evoking an almost endless series of horrors: Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan, Congo, climate change, ecological devastation, and the seemingly unavoidable face of Donald Trump … Not to mention the high-volume, 24/7 omnipresence of social media in many people’ s lives. The result leaves us numb. In this lucid, trenchant book, Mark Abley explores the idea of numbness in a political context. Numbness serves as a useful lens through which to look at feelings – or the absence of feelings – about many of the issues affecting and disfiguring life in our time. Authoritarian leaders and genocidal regimes have found numbness a desirable goal to attain among their citizens, as it narrows the possibilities for revolt. The “ shock and awe” doctrine that Donald Rumsfeld proclaimed during the American invasion of Iraq was but a foretaste of our current plight. Shocked and awed into submission, we stand at the mercy of tyrants. The sense of being overwhelmed induces numbness, as though we were captive animals in a zoo. Behind bars, animals have no agency. What we see in zoo animals today may be a ghostly image of ourselves.

US Pricew, $16.95 USD

TRACTION, a new imprint of chapbooks addressing current and contemporary issues